If only publishers followed the ASA mantra...

At first glance it’s not immediately apparent that the Advertising Standards Authority mantra –‘legal, honest, decent and truthful’ – is relevant to today’s premium publishing world. It’s advertisers, publishers might argue, that should take their share of the blame for the mess that is today’s online publishing environment.

In the face of these seemingly unstoppable forces, premium publishers have gone with the flow, chasing low-value clicks with low-value content, of which the clickbait headline is the leading indicator.

You will have your own views of the worst examples of clickbait, but they are easy to spot. Key words like ‘Biggest’; ‘Funniest’; ‘Weirdest’; ‘Top’; ‘Shocking’; or pointless rhetorical questions.

Like this one: ‘Think this is just a normal shed? Just wait till you see inside’.

Worse, simple-to-use analytical tools like Chartbeat and Parse.ly which allow and encourage publishing teams to optimise content (via the headline as a selling device) to this nanosecond’s hashtag trend, compound the problem.

Thus, we now see increasing use by publishing management of clicks as a means to incentivise journalists who, naturally, respond in the predictable Pavlovian manner: clickbait.

There’s a story, which we don’t think is apocryphal, of a UK premium publisher offering two journalists on £25,000 (US$33,000) per year, a £5,000 ($6,600) bonus each for a weekend’s work. Their task: drive as much traffic to their site as possible over the Black Friday weekend. It’s not hard to guess how they would behave as a result.

And, as publishers dip their toes into ecommerce – adding further complications of potential conflict of interest – this sort of thing won’t go away any time soon.

(Depressingly) predictable results

Chartbeat data shows that only about 55 per cent of people who click through to a story actually read it. Headlines that get the most clicks get the least attention. Here’s former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, now at Scroll, talking about the problems.

Chartbeat data shows there’s no correlation between social shares and article engagement

Does that mean all quality online journalism is going down a clickbait-led plughole? No. There are plenty of outstanding examples of late.

The Observer’s uncovering of the Facebook / CA scandal. The New York Times and New Yorker’s joint expose of Harvey Weinstein. Team Sky’s ‘mystery envelopes’, first uncovered by the Daily Mail. The Times digging into both the Oxfam sex scandal and its steady attacks on YouTube’s cavalier disregard for brand safety.

Re-focus on the triangle of trust

We can be sympathetic to the ills that plague publishers. But that doesn’t mean we should condone their behaviour.

It’s time to think differently.

It’s time to focus instead on metrics that link to trust, whether repeat visits or time spent.

Thankfully, there’s evidence publishers get this. Take the Forbes contributor model, which pays $0.005 for every one-time unique, and $0.05 for every repeat visitor up to 100,000 over a month – ie ten times as much for a repeat visitor. Let’s say a contributor hits their top repeats target – that’s $5,000 – a tidy sum for a journalist/writer. Thus note how the financing incentivises quality and disincentivises clickbait.

But the AdTech community also needs to step up. We play an integral role in supporting the triangle. As an industry, we need to provide publishers with the tech that allows them to focus on – and monetise – quality content. With Rezonence’s FreeWall, advertisers pay when the consumer engages – which only happens when they read past the first two paragraphs. This means only content that is interesting and/or valuable to readers generates income for the publisher.

If the reader chooses not to engage, the publisher doesn’t get paid.

Rezonence data as of May 2018

Think of this as a self-supporting triangle of trust led by the publisher.

The publisher trusts/incentivises journalists to produce quality content. This gains reader trust, driving higher attention and time spent. An enhanced reader experience and trust drives repeat visits. Advertisers gain from greater reader attention and being seen to be present in a trusted environment.

You may say the triangle of trust is irrecoverably broken.

We disagree. It can be repaired – if publishers stop chasing headline-driven clicks and focus instead on the content. At its core, it’s about honesty.

Readers would benefit. And, of course, there’s no shortage of advertisers out there who’d welcome that too.

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